overall 6 votes: 
editor average: 
A young professional in Chicago discovers the nebulous power of style, which subsequently threatens to consume him as he propels himself towards the American Dream. . . .
overall 3 votes:
editor average:
18 year-old Szandi is part of Budapest’s cosmopolitan art scene, sharing a flat and a bohemian lifestyle with her lover and fellow sculptress, Yang. She has finally found her place in the world. Then a letter arrives that threatens everything, and forces her to choose once and for all: between the past and the present; between East and West; between . . .
editor rating 1 vote:
Sebastian Arcady is a vain, eccentric violinist, with a genius for observation and deduction, who thinks he’s the next Sherlock Holmes. Phineas Zene is a washed-up, pragmatic cellist, with a punch like daylight bursting through your skull, who doesn’t want to be the next Watson. They live and breathe classical music in a way that makes obsessive classical . . .
It is often easy for one writer to recognize when a fellow writer has tried too hard in his fiction. This is when prose is no longer hot lightning from head to hand, but something decidedly more difficult and less inspired: ie, the careful task of forming whole words, perfect words, in the absence of creative heat. All of us [more . . .]
Very rarely does a writer capture both a character’s emotional depths and the culture which produced them. Seth K. succeeds at both. He succeeds at drawing a realistic portrait of our celebrity-addled culture and conjuring a remarkable representative for that culture.
When I first read the novel, I became carried away [more . . .]